By-and-by you will read more about how the workers, by their busy toil,
"Raise such monstrous hills along the plain
Larger than mountains,"
in proportion to their own small size; you will read also strange stories
of how they collect the eggs of those little green insects which you may
see in such numbers upon a rosebud, and tend them with great care--because
these tiny aphides are their "cows," and they "milk" them by gently
stroking them with their antennae, and so obtain a kind of honey--also how
the red and black ants occupy the positions of masters and slaves, the
blacks doing all the hardest work, and being kept strictly indoors; and how
it is not _all_ work, even with the workers, for they have been caught at
play, having high games of leap-frog and hide-and-seek!
Interesting as is the mode of life among our ants at home, not less so is
that of those found in Southern Europe and in Syria, as well as in India.
They are called "Harvesters," because they "prepare their meat in the
summer" by gathering the seeds of grasses, and storing them in granaries
against the winter. I have watched long trains of these ants going and
returning with their loads, keeping their "own side" as carefully as if
passengers in London streets. A naturalist who was watching such a train,
once strewed a number of grey and white beads about, and waited to see what
would happen. One unsuspicious ant seized a bead and trotted off with it
to the nest; but not so a second time; the mistake was soon found out, and
the (to them) worthless beads were left untouched by the wary workers, who
before they stored the seeds in their granary, took off the chaff and left
it in heaps outside, to be blown away by the wind.
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